A police doctor who drugged, sexually attacked and filmed young girls was today jailed for 15 years as police appealed for other victims to contact them,

A police doctor who drugged, sexually attacked and filmed young girls was today jailed for 15 years as police appealed for other victims to contact them,

Forensic medical examiner Robert Wells was found guilty of nine counts involving three girls, two aged 11 and one aged five.

The 52-year-old from Cwmbran, Gwent, was convicted of two rapes and three indecent assaults of an 11-year-old girl and taking an indecent photograph of her.

Wells, who has been a doctor for 27 years, was also found guilty of drugging and indecently assaulting another 11-year-old girl and administering drugs to her five-year-old sister.

The jury of nine men and three women cleared Wells of one count of rape and one of indecent assault of the five-year-old after seven and a half hours of deliberations at Winchester Crown Court.

He had denied all the charges during the four week trial.

But as the verdicts were read out, curly-haired Wells, wearing a suit with a yellow tie, closed his eyes before staring ahead.

Wells received sentences totalling 11 years for the rape and attacks on the first 11-year-old girl between September 2002 and January 2003 and a further four year consecutive sentence for drugging the two sisters and indecently assaulting the elder girl.

Sentencing Wells, Judge Keith Cutler said: "You have presented yourself at trial as a man of good character and as a hard working, able and generous medical doctor.

"The evidence put before the jury has also revealed the sinister and secret traits of your character.

"And by their verdicts, the jury have found you a dangerous sex offender preying on young girls, influencing their families with your money and the status of your profession and gaining their trust and therefore gaining unsupervised access to those girls."

He added: "It is my conclusion that you gained particular perverted pleasure from the power you had over your victims, particularly when you used your professional knowledge to administer Temazepam to facilitate your indecent assaults on them while filming them."

Judge Cutler added that Wells's behaviour had cast a shadow over the medical profession.

He said: "These convictions today will send a shiver down the spines of many now fearful that your examination of them, some of them probably vulnerable or abused, gave you some form of perverted pleasure that no doctor should enjoy.

"It's difficult to imagine a more disturbing and gross breach of trust."

After sentencing, Detective Inspector Sara Glen, who led the investigation, said officers were convinced that Wells had committed similar offences.

"We have a computer which belonged to Dr Wells that has a long list of girls' names on it but the programme is encrypted.

"We are working on trying to get into this computer and we firmly believe that the crimes Dr Wells has been convicted of today are not isolated incidents and we appeal for anyone who may have been a victim to come forward and we will investigate," she said.

The trial heard that Wells, formerly of Hangleton Road, Hove, and Priory Avenue, Southampton, worked as what is commonly known as a police surgeon in the Southampton and Winchester areas of Hampshire and also had a private practice in Brighton.

What the jury at Winchester were not told was that Wells had been charged with abusing girls before.

He was acquitted of attacking an eight-year-old and a girl of 15 in separate trials at Lewes Crown Court in 1995.

In a case which has parallels with that of Soham child killer Ian Huntley, a loophole in vetting procedures allowed Wells to work as a police surgeon despite the charges.

He sought work from a company called Primecare in October 2001. They sub-contracted the doctor to Hampshire Police to work as a Forensic Medical Examiner despite him being known to the neighbouring Sussex force.

This was because the guidelines in force from 1993 to 2002 only required police to check locally and not, as is the case now, the areas a person has lived in for the last five years.

The vetting procedures have been improved since the Criminal Records Bureau was set up in 2002, according to a the Home Office.

The jury was also not made aware of Well's notorious past as a bankrupt described in the Press as a `Romeo Doc', who had debts of #1.5 million accumulated through failed businesses and indulgent spending on women.

During the trial, Stephen Parish, prosecuting, described Wells as a 'Dr Jekyll and Dr Hyde' character and a 'serial paedophile'.

He said that he lied to the mother of the two sisters, persuading her to leave them solely in his care on February 25 last year.

After a trip to Marwell Zoo in Hampshire, he took them to his flat in Southampton where he drugged them both in Angel Delight desserts that he fed them before assaulting the elder child as she slept while filming the attack.

It was not until after Wells dropped them off the next day that the mother noticed the older girl was "spaced out".

The youngster was taken to hospital and blood and urine samples found the older girl had Benzodiazepine in her body and the younger sister also had Temazepam in her samples.

Both drugs would have knocked the girls out and caused them to suffer amnesia.

Mr Parish said the levels in the older girl could have been potentially fatal and Wells had got it wrong and overdosed the girl.

At the Southampton address police found a piece of paper which the prosecution alleged was a timetable for the drugging of the two sisters and the abuse of the elder one.

It gave times for picking them up from the train station and going to the zoo.

Other notes gave times and the words Angel Delight and Viagra plus indications that what happened had been filmed.

Checks on a seized computer revealed that a film had been created and deleted in the early hours of February 26 and deleted files with the name of the 11-year-old girl on them were also discovered.

Detectives then spoke to another 11-year-old daughter of a family friend from Brighton and she alleged that Wells had attacked her repeatedly during most of 2002 and early 2003 when he was alone with her.

Giving evidence, she said that Wells rubbed baby oil over her and then raped her "five or six times" at his flat in Southampton or his camper van in the autumn of 2002 and winter of 2003.

The court heard an examination found the girl had been raped and the sleeping drug Temazepam was found in a sample of her hair.

In the raid on the Southampton house police also found a contraption of covered polystyrene on a wooden board with red straps which the girl said was called Satan's Pillow.

She said Wells had raped her on it several times.

Police also found several computers at Wells's Brighton home and found a movie of the 11-year-old girl being assaulted in a camper van.

Other images involving the girl were also found on Wells' computers along with child pornography and evidence of him accessing paedophile newsgroups.

Timothy Mouseley Q, defending, said patients of Wells had described him as `a unique and inspirational doctor'.

He added: "It appears there are two sides to his character, a dark side but the other side of his character is reflected in the way so many people speak of him as a man who has made a significant contribution in public life and the medical sphere."

Wells has been suspended as a doctor by the General Medical Council and was today banned indefinitely from working with children and placed for life on the sex offenders' register.

A spokeswoman for Primecare said that Wells had worked for the medical staffing agency since 1979 but added that it had completed all the checks required under the government guidelines in place at that time.

The company also expressed its sympathies to Wells's victims and their families.